Rim of Morning
If all the books
of my life returned as trees,
an oak grove, say,
and treading beneath,
I looked up and saw their boughs
gone clear, revealing
the water within;
if all around gushed sunward from my life
myriad fountains --
I think of someone I used to know
who translated Homer, died,
then came back as a clump of snowdrops.
Beneath him lay nothing but grayish ochre
dead oak leaves. Above him, bare shrubs
veining the sky.
“Ithaca at last,”
he laughed.
***
Earth revolves, mists
whiten with dawn,
and the living rise to work,
each fighting for life,
and it’s strange. Nobody asked us, did they?
We are simply here,
friends,
on the clear rim of morning.
***
Now, about those dirt clots that won’t shake loose
from root-hairs – sing of them
as islands, caught
in a net of pale dawn,
while dead roots pattering down through soil
possess the ground
like those footsteps
that made Orpheus look behind him.
For without song,
friends,
it’s the death no one knows
and the birth no one remembers
fast in each other’s jaws --
without song.
S. Muir is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
in poetry; the Bernard F. Connors prize from The Paris Review; and four
Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence fellowships in fiction,
nonfiction and poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly
Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Stand, The Yale Review,
Harvard Review, and other journals. Her chapbook, Heredity and Other
Inventions, was the winner of the C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl prize, and
her first poetry collection, During Ceasefire, was published by Harper
& Row. She is the author of five books of poetry and prose. She
teaches creative writing at Bowling Green State University.
Amethyst Review 